Saturday, March 15, 2008

I have recently created flash cards for the teaching Polish alphabet. The flash cards are designed for toddlers, so they have simple, colorful pictures and simple words containing each letter. I've created a separate web page for "resources for teaching Polish to kids" but chances are that those flash cards are the only thing I will ever put on the site.

It was surprisingly easy to find images that I could use. I downloaded most of them from the public domain clip art repository (http://www.wpclipart.com). One exception is the picture for "ź" which is from http://commons.wikimedia.org. Letter "ź" is by the way the one that was most difficult to find a good word for. Some Polish words can never be at a start of a word, so I could easily give up for them but in general, I wanted for each letter a word that starts with this letter. For "ź", I considered following words: "źdźbło", "źrebię/źrebak", "źródło" i "źrenica". I liked most "źródło" but couldn't find a good image for it (if you have one you can suggest, please let me know). I didn't want to use "źrebię" because my daughter (she was 2 when I started working on the cards) would easily confuse it with the word "koń" or "kucyk". Similarly I didn't want to have to explain the difference between "źrenica" and "oko". So, I ended up using "źdźbło" but this word has four consonants in a row which doesn't really make it the best choice for one of the first words you learn in Polish.

I didn't think of this: very easy to pronounce. Definitely worth considering. The only small problem that it's hard to find a picture that will make it clear that what's on the picture. It would look more like "zupa" lub "talerz".